Ah, interesting. Thanks for sharing. I’m sure this will help other users experiencing these issues.
Mylenium
Patrick. Thanks for the tip, but could you please say what sort of crashes you were experiencing, for example, PS closed by the OS due to an attempted illegal operation, or PS "Not Responding". Did the PS crash take the OS with it or not?
I am experiencing random crashes under the circumstances similar to those you you describe. In my case however, Photoshop stops responding, but Ctrl-Alt-Del does not work, so there is nothing else to do but to reboot the computer. I have never found Photoshop wanting to disable GPU acceleration as a result though. Is anyone else experiencing symptoms similar to these?
If ctrl-alt-del does nothing, your system is hung due to hardware or a low level driver. We’ve seen issues in the past with RAM, bad motherboards, and some video card drivers causing this.
wrote:
Patrick. Thanks for the tip, but could you please say what sort of crashes you were experiencing, for example, PS closed by the OS due to an attempted illegal operation
Hi Basil,
I always get an application error which causes the standard error reporting dialog box to open (do you want to report this problem to Microsoft… – no, of course, I’d like to report to Adobe instead). Then the application is closed by the OS. I can relaunch immediately. No need to reboot.
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Patrick
It is crashing when I am doing a photomerge. Suggestion ASAP thanks you
Thanks for replying, Patrick. It looks as if we have different problems.
Chris Cox,
If ctrl-alt-del does nothing, your system is hung due to hardware or a low level driver. We’ve seen issues in the past with RAM, bad motherboards, and some video card drivers causing this.
That is my understanding too, but having replaced every hardware component under the hood, reformatted my hard drive, reinstalled Windows from scratch with all the latest drivers and changed my firewall and AV software, the problem still occurs. It is only Photoshop that stalls, and it does it reliably. Both Dell and Adobe technical support have done their best to find the problem and have failed. There is nothing particularly odd about my system or the software installed on it. The spec may be a little dated but it appears quite capable of running PSCS4 – better than some newer systems by all accounts – right up until the moment it stalls that is.
I have tried out the settings suggested by Patrick with Nvidia FX3450 graphics, driver version 178.46.
So far I have had no crashes.
However I find that the changes have the effect of disabling OpenGL drawing (even though the OpenGL box remains ticked in the Performance Preferences). So smooth panning, flick panning, rotate etc don’t work, and redrawing is slow. Trying to use the rotate tool, for example, gives a warning dialogue saying that the tool is only available in an OpenGL enabled workspace window. This is despite OpenGL being enabled and Photoshop apparently not having disabled it.
So I expect that we are nowhere forward except for an increased suspicion that the graphics settings have something to do with Photoshop crashing on some systems.
I think that the Photoshop engineers need to look at this further. In the meantime, does anyone know which of the above settings might cause OpenGL to be disabled? (I should point out that not all of the above appear in my Nvidia 3D settings. I only applied the changes to those that are. I’ve really no idea what any of them mean.)
It crashed! B***r!
So the graphics card 3D settings do not affect my problem.
NVidia provide a set of custom program settings for Photoshop CS4 with their latest drivers. These can be accessed in the NVidia Settings control and are automatically activated when Photoshop CS4 is run. I have now restored these to their original settings and lo all the OpenGL functionality has returned. Photoshop still crashes (freezes) unexpectedly though, but that evidently is another story 🙁
Basil:
I have an nVidia 9600GT, which is one of the "recommended" cards, with the latest drivers. PhotoShop still throws up random reports of incompatibility with my card.
Can you tell me how to access the custom program settings within the nVidia settings area? It’s not immediately obvious to me.
-wick
Find NVIDIA 3S settings in Start>Control Panel>NVIDIA Control Panel.
Then see this: Wolf Eilers, "CS4 and nvidia 180.48 driver – disable PhysX GPU acceleration" #8, 6 Dec 2008 11:32 am </webx?14/7>
Basil,
However I find that the changes have the effect of disabling OpenGL drawing (even though the OpenGL box remains ticked in the Performance Preferences). So smooth panning, flick panning, rotate etc don’t work, and redrawing is slow. Trying to use the rotate tool, for example, gives a warning dialogue saying that the tool is only available in an OpenGL enabled workspace window.
I don’t have these problems with the settings mentioned above. Panning, rotate, etc. work flawlessly. And I still didn’t experience any crash since I changed the driver settings as described. However, the 6600 GT is using version 178.24 of the driver, not the one you have.
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Patrick
Can you tell me how to access the custom program settings within the NVidia settings area? It’s not immediately obvious to me.
Open NVidia Settings -> NVidia Control Panel -> Manage 3D Settings
Select the Program Settings tab and Adobe Photoshop CS4 should appear on the drop-down menu. There is a useful Restore button which takes you back to the original settings, so you can feel free to play about.
Basil
I recently made some changes to the NVidia settings and had no crash since then
No luck. After working a few days with the settings I suggested in my initial message without any problem, CS4 failed again upon startup claiming it had a problem with OpenGL. I re-enabled GPU and re-started PS CS4 without the beast complaining in any way this time. So these settings are obviously not a solution for this random bug. Sorry.
It’s really time to fix it now.
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Patrick
Patrick, with respect to Chris’ comment, if you can find a different brand of RAM, even one stick say 2G, try it.
One other thing. Did your mouse fail also?
Are you running XP or Vista? 64 o4 32 bit?
a écrit dans le message de news:
Are you running XP or Vista? 64 o4 32 bit?
My configuration has been fully described in my initial message (XP Pro 32-bit SP3).
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Patrick
Patrick, Please turn off the autoquote in your newsreader.
Bob
a écrit dans le message de news:
Patrick, with respect to Chris’ comment, if you can find a different brand of RAM, even one stick say 2G, try it.
Only the PS application is crashing, not the system. As to the quality of the RAM, I’m a developer and I’m using tools that consume much more memory than PS. So if the idea is that PS CS4 is reaching (bad) memory regions that other applications never use, therefore causing a crash, that’s not the case. My tools are sometimes exhausting all available physical memory and I never had a problem. The problem is PS CS4 and how it works with my display driver. There was no problem with CS3.
One other thing. Did your mouse fail also?
No. And I removed MS IntelliPoint anyway which is not that useful.
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Patrick
Is that causing any trouble somewhere? In the Web version of the forum?
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Patrick
Yes…it’s a mess.
As you should be able to see I’m using a newsreader, too…but when in Rome…
Thanks,
Bob
So, when Ctrl/Alt/Del hangs, the mouse runs? You can reboot with the mouse?
Can you exit the program and still run another program successfully including Ctrl/Alt/Del?
I have not been clear enough, I guesss. I said that only the PS application is crashing. I don’t have to use Ctrl-Alt-Del and I don’t have to reboot because after acknowledging the application error, the process is gone.
These PS crashes never caused the system or anything else to hang. I only have two kinds of errors:
– EITHER PS CS4 displays random error messages about OpenGL and it continues working after disabling the GPU
– OR it merely crashes. A real, classical, solid crash (application error). The process is gone after ackonledging the error message and I have to relaunch the program.
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Patrick
Oh, right. It was Basil’s comment not yours! 😀
